Colloquium
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.
Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
Please susbscribe to our mailing list here to receive the meeting information and the password to download the paper from the Agrarian Studies website. If you have any questions, contact agrarian.studies@yale.edu.
Fall 2024
September 13
Tulia Falleti
Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor od Political Science; Director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies; Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics; Tri-Chair of the Faculty Senate
University of Pennsylvania
The Timing of Legal Recognition: Indigenous Communities and Territorial Claims in Argentina, 1978-2022
September 20
Pavithra Vasudevan
Assistant Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin
In the Crucible: Metaphor and Materiality in Storytelling Capitalism
September 27
Sarah Foss
Assistant Professor of History
Oklahoma State University
'Here I was born, and here I will die': The Politics of Precarity Amidst Ongoing Environmental Disaster in Guatemala
October 4
Sarah Balakrishnan
Assistant Professor of History
Duke University
Sacred Land and Spiritual Economy in the Gold Coast (Ghana): An Anticolonial Tradition
October 11
Anthony Dest
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Lehman College, CUNY, New York
Making Peasants Count: Creole Whiteness and the Politics of Recognition
October 25
Ting Hui Lau
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
National University of Singapore
Decolonial Endurance: Indigenous Worldmaking on the China-Myanmar Border
November 1
Sarah Vogel
Advocate, Attorney, Author
The Wild Ride: Keepseagle Class Action and the Decades-Long Fight of Native American Ranchers and Farmers
November 8
Kimberly Marion Suiseeya
Associate Professor, Faculty Affiliate Center for Native American and Indigenous Research; Faculty Fellow Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Weinnberg College
Northwestern University
Reordering Rights for Self-Determination in a Changing Climate
November 15
Lizzie Yarina
Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning
Northeastern University
Maps that Leak: Living with Climate Adaptation in Vietnam's Mekong Delta
December 6
Lloyd Sy
Assistant Professor of English
Yale University
Buffalo Bird Woman Makes a Garden: Memory and Native Horticulture
Spring 2025
January 24
Yuan Gao
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
"Stringing Beads": Karez Irrigation and Property Rights in Qing China's Arid Land.
January 31
Dixita Deka
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
Arms to Farms: Making of the Farming Collectives and Post-Insurgency Recovery in Northeast India
February 7
Matthew Ghazarian
Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Agrarian Studies
Yale University
Precarities of Plenty: Ottoman Famine and the Ecology of Debt.
February 14
Christian Espinosa Schatz
Graduate Affiliate Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies (Anthropology)
Yale University
The Transnationalization of Mayan Agriculture
February 21
Mariana Diaz Chalela
Graduate Affiliate Fellow, Program in Agrarian Studies (History)
Yale University
"Good Creditors and Good Debtors: Campesino Identity and Agricultural Credit in the Colombian Twentieth Century"
February 28
Santiago Acosta
Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Yale University
Unearthing Value: Visions of Gold in Contemporary Venezuelan Art
March 28
Sophie Chao
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology
University of Sydney
Skinship, scarship: Multispecies vulnerabilities and plantation violence in West Papua
April 4
China Sajadian
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Vassar College
Debts of Displacement: The Paradoxes of Patronage in a Syrian Refugee Farmworker Camp
April 11
Aditya Ramesh
Assistant Professor of History
University of Washington- Seattle
Water, fish, and energy: energy and agrarian democracy in south India c. 1920-1971
April 18
Matthew Shutzer
Assistant Professor of Environmental History
Duke University
The Nation's Geobody
April 25
Graduate Student Colloquium